The Jury Returns: A
Juridical Defense of Christianity by Dr. John Warwick Montgomery

An excerpt from
Evidence for Faith Chapter 6, Part 2

EXISTENTIAL, BLIND
"LEAPS OF FAITH" can be and often are suicide jumps, with no criteria of truth
available before the leap is made. But suppose the truth of a religious claim
did not depend upon an unverifiable, subjectivistic leap of faith? What if a
revelational truth-claim did not turn on questions of theology and religious
philosophy-on any kind of esoteric, fideistic method available only to those
who are already "true believers"-but on the very reasoning employed in the law
to determine questions of fact?

The historic Christian claim differs
qualitatively from the claims of all other world religions at the
epistemological point: on the issue of testability. Eastern faiths and Islam,
to take familiar examples, ask the uncommitted seeker to discover their truth
experientially: the faith-experience will be self-validating. Unhappily, as
analytical philosopher Kai Nielsen and others have rigorously shown, a
subjective faith-experience is logically incapable of "validating
God-talk"-including the alleged absolutes about which the god in question does
the talking. Christianity, on the other hand, declares that the truth of its
absolute claims rests squarely on certain historical facts, open to ordinary
investigation. These facts relate essentially to the man Jesus, His
presentation of Himself as God in human flesh, and His resurrection from the
dead as proof of His deity.

Thus the rabbinic lawyer, Christian
convert, and apostle-Paul of Tarsus-offered this gospel to Stoic philosophers
at Athens as the historically verifiable fulfillment of natural religion and
the natural law tradition, with their vague and insufficiently defined
content.

Certain Epicurean
and Stoic philosophers encountered [Paul at Athens]. And some said, What will
this babbler say? Others said, He seems to be setting forth strange gods-for he
had been preaching Jesus and the resurrection to them. And they took him to the
Areopagus, saying, May we know what this new doctrine is of which you are
speaking?...

Then Paul stood at the center of the Areopagus and said,
You men of Athens, I note that in all things you are too superstitious. For as
I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription:
TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore you ignorantly worship I declare to
you...The times of this ignorance God winked at, but now commands all men
everywhere to repent, for he has appointed a day when he will judge the world
in righteousness by the Man whom he has ordained, and he has given assurance of
it to all in that he has raised him from the dead.

At one point in his speech, Paul asserted
that human life is the product of divine creation, "as certain also of your own
[Stoic] poets have said," thereby making clear that classical natural law
thinking was correct as far as it went, though it did not by any means go far
enough. Its completion could be found in Jesus, the Man whom God ordained, and
His divine character was verifiable through His resurrection from the dead.

Elsewhere I have argued this case by employing standard, accepted
techniques of historical analysis. Here we shall use legal reasoning and the
law of evidence. The advantage of a jurisprudential approach lies in the
difficulty of jettisoning it: legal standards of evidence develop as essential
means of resolving the most intractable disputes in society (dispute settlement
by self-help-the only alternative to adjudication-will tear any society apart).
Thus one cannot very well throw out legal reasoning merely because its
application to Christianity results in a verdict for the Christian faith.

Significantly, both in philosophy and in theology, there are moves to
introduce juridical styles of reasoning. Stephen Toulmin, professor of
philosophy at Leeds and one of the foremost analytical philosophers of our
time, presents a veritable call to arms:

To break the power
of old models and analogies, we can provide ourselves with a new one. Logic is
concerned with the soundness of the claims we make-with the solidity of the
grounds we produce to support them, the firmness of the backing we provide for
them-or, to change the metaphor, with the sort of case we present in
defence of our claims. The legal analogy implied in this last way of putting
the point can for once be a real help. So let us forget about psychology,
sociology, technology and mathematics, ignore the echoes of structural
engineering and collage in the words 'grounds' and 'backing,' and take
as our model the discipline of jurisprudence. Logic (we may say) is generalized
jurisprudence. Arguments can be compared with law-suits, and the claims we make
and argue for in extra-legal contexts with claims made in the courts, while the
cases we present in making good each kind of claim can be compared with each
other.

Mortimer Adler, at the end of his careful
discussion of the question of God's existence, employs, not the traditional
philosophical ideal of Cartesian absolute certainty, but the legal standards of
proof by preponderance of evidence and proof beyond reasonable doubt:

If I am able to say no more than that a
preponderance of reasons favor believing that God exists, I can still say I
have advanced reasonable grounds for that belief...

I am persuaded
that God exists, either beyond a reasonable doubt or by a preponderance of
reasons in favor of that conclusion over reasons against it. I am, therefore,
willing to terminate this inquiry with the statement that I have reasonable
grounds for affirming God's existence.

And from the jurisprudential side, Jerome
Hall recognizes the potential for arbitrating central issues of religion and
ethics by the sophisticated instrument of legal reasoning.

Legal rules of evidence are reflections
of "natural reason," and they could enter into dialogues in several ways, for
example, to test the validity of theological arguments for the existence of God
and to distinguish secular beliefs, even those held without any reasonable
doubt, from faith that is so firm (Job's) that it excludes the slightest shadow
of doubt and persists even in the face of evidence that on rational grounds is
plainly contradictory. In these and other ways the rationality of the law of
evidence in the trial of an issue of fact joins philosophical rationalism in
raising pertinent questions about faith.

In terms of our
discussion, what are the "pertinent questions about faith"? Four over-arching
questions need to be answered: (1) Are the historical records of Jesus solid
enough to rely upon? (2) Is the testimony in these records concerning His life
and ministry sufficiently reliable to know what He claimed about Himself? (3)
Do the accounts of His resurrection from the dead, offered as proof of His
divine claims, in fact establish those claims? (4) If Jesus' deity is
established in the foregoing manner, does He place a divine stamp of approval
on the Bible so as to render its pronouncements apodictically certain? Let us
see how legal reasoning helps to answer each of these key questions.

Basic to any determination of the soundness of Christian claims is the question
of the reliability of the pertinent historical documents. The documents at
issue are not (pace the man on the Clapham omnibus) Josephus, Tacitus,
Pliny the Younger, or other pagan references to Jesus, though these do of
course exist. Such references are secondary at best, since none of these
writers had firsthand contact with Jesus or with His disciples. The documents
on which the case for Christianity depends are the New Testament writings, for
they claim to have been written by eyewitnesses or by close associates of
eyewitnesses (indeed, their origin in apostolic circles was the essential
criterion for including them in the New Testament).

How good are these
New Testament records? They handsomely fulfill the historian's requirements of
transmissional reliability (their texts have been transmitted accurately
from the time of writing to our own day), internal reliability (they
claim to be primary-source documents and ring true as such), and external
reliability (their authorships and dates are backed up by such solid
extrinsic testimony as that of the early second-century writer Papias, a
student of John the Evangelist, who was told by him that the first three
Gospels were indeed written by their traditional authors). Harvard's Simon
Greenleaf, the greatest nineteenth-century authority on the law of evidence in
the common-law world, applied to these records the "ancient documents" rule:
ancient documents will be received as competent evidence if they are "fair on
their face" (i.e., offer no internal evidence of tampering) and have been
maintained in "reasonable custody" (i.e., their preservation has been
consistent with their content). He concluded that the competence of the New
Testament documents would be established in any court of law.

The
speculation that the Gospel records were "faked" some three hundred years after
the events described in them (a viewpoint gratuitously proffered by Professor
Trevor-Roper) is dismissed by Lord Chancellor Hailsham, England's highest
ranking legal luminary, with an apt lawyer's illustration.

[What] renders the argument invalid is a
fact about fakes of all kinds which I learned myself in the course of a case I
did in which there was in question the authenticity of a painting purporting to
be by, and to be signed by, Modigliani. This painting, as the result of my
Advice on Evidence, was shown to be a fake by X-ray evidence. But in the course
of my researches I was supplied by my instructing solicitor with a considerable
bibliography concerning the nature of fakes of all kinds and how to detect
them. There was one point made by the author of one of these books which is of
direct relevance to the point I am discussing. Although fakes can often be made
which confuse or actually deceive contemporaries of the faker, the experts, or
even the not so expert, of a later age can invariably detect them, whether
fraudulent or not because the faker cannot fail to include stylistic or other
material not obvious to contemporaries because they are contemporaries, but
which stand out a mile to later observers because they reflect the standards,
or the materials, or the styles of a succeeding age to that of the author whose
work is being faked.

As for the skepticism of the so-called
higher critics (or redaction critics) in the liberal theological tradition, it
stems from an outmoded methodology (almost universally discarded today by
classical and literary scholars and by specialists in comparative Near Eastern
studies), and from unjustified philosophical presuppositions (such as
anti-supernaturalistic bias and bias in favor of religious evolution). A.N.
Sherwin-White, a specialist in Roman law, countered such critics in his 1960-61
Sarum Lectures at the University of London.

It is astonishing that while
Graeco-Roman historians have been growing in confidence, the twentieth-century
study of the Gospel narratives, starting from the no less promising material,
has taken so gloomy a turn in the development of form-criticism that the more
advanced exponents of it apparently maintain-so far as an amateur can
understand the matter-that the historical Christ is unknowable and the history
of His mission cannot be written. This seems very curious when one compares the
case for the best-known contemporary of Christ, who like Christ is a
well-documented figure-Tiberius Caesar. The story of his reign is known from
four sources, the Annals of Tacitus and the biography of Suetonius,
written some eighty or ninety years later, the brief contemporary record of
Velleius Paterculus, and the third century history of Cassius Dio. These
disagree amongst themselves in the wildest possible fashion, both in major
matters of political action or motive and in specific details of minor events.
Everyone would admit that Tacitus is the best of all the sources, and yet no
serious modern historian would accept at face value the majority of the
statements of Tacitus about the motives of Tiberius. But this does not prevent
the belief that the material of Tacitus can be used to write a history of
Tiberius.

The conclusion is inescapable: if one
compares the New Testament documents with universally accepted secular writings
of antiquity, the New Testament is more than vindicated. Some years ago, when I
debated philosophy professor Avrum Stroll of the University of British Columbia
on this point, he responded: "All right. I'll throw out my knowledge of the
classical world." At which the chairman of the classics department cried: "Good
Lord, Avrum, not that!"

If, as we have seen, the New Testament
records are sound historical documents, how good is their testimony of Jesus?
This is a question of great importance, since the accounts tell us plainly that
Jesus claimed to be nothing less than God-in-the-flesh, come to earth to reveal
God's will for the human race and to save human beings from the penalty of
their sins. Moreover, the same testimony meticulously records Jesus'
post-resurrection appearances, so a decision as to its reliability will also
bear directly on third major question, the historicity of the resurrection.

In a court of law, admissible testimony is considered truthful unless
impeached or otherwise rendered doubtful. This is in accord with ordinary life,
where only the paranoiac goes about with the bias that everyone is lying.
(Think of Cousin Elmo, convinced that he is followed by Albanians.) The burden,
then, is on those who would show that the New Testament testimony to Jesus is
not worthy of belief. Let us place the Gospel testimony to Jesus under the
legal microscope to see if its reliability can be impeached.

Here we
employ a construct for attacking perjury that has been labeled "the finest work
on that subject." McCloskey and Schoenberg offer a fourfold test for exposing
perjure, involving a determination of internal and external
defects in the witness himself on the one hand and in the
testimony itself on the other. We can translate their schema into
diagrammatic form thusly:

(a) Internal defects in the witness
himself refer to any personal characteristics or past history tending to show
that the "witness is inherently untrustworthy, unreliable, or undependable."
Were the apostolic witnesses to Jesus persons who may be disbelieved because
they were "not the type of persons who can be trusted"? Did they have criminal
records or is there reason to think they were pathological liars? If anything,
their simple literalness and directness is almost painful. They seem singularly
poor candidates for a James Bond thriller or for being cast in the role of "Spy
and Counterspy."

But perhaps they were mythomanes-people
incapable of distinguishing fact from fantasy? They themselves declare
precisely the contrary: "We have not followed cunningly devised fables [Gk.
mythoi, 'myths']," they write, "when we made known unto you the power
and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty."

(b) But perhaps the apostolic witnesses suffered from external defects,
that is, "motives to falsify"?

Not all perjurers have committed prior
immoral acts or prior crimes. Frequently, law abiding citizens whose pasts are
without blemish will commit perjury, not because they are inherently unworthy,
but because some specific present reason compels them to do so in the case at
bar. Motive, then, becomes the common denominator. There is a motive for every
act of perjury. The second major way in which the cross-examiner can seek to
expose perjury, therefore, is to isolate the specific motive which causes the
witness to commit perjury.

Surely no sensible
person would argue that the apostolic witnesses would have lied about Jesus for
monetary gain or as a result of societal pressure. To the contrary: they lost
the possibility both of worldly wealth and of social acceptability among their
Jewish peers because of their commitment to Jesus. Might that very affection
for and attachment to Jesus serve as a motive to falsify? Not when we remember
that their Master expressly taught them that lying was of the devil.

(c) Turning now to the testimony itself, we must ask if the New Testament
writings are internally inconsistent or self-contradictory. Certainly, the Four
Gospels do not give identical, verbatim accounts of the words or acts of Jesus.
But if they did, that fact alone would make them highly suspect, for it would
point to collusion. The Gospel records view the life and ministry of Jesus from
four different perspectives-just as vertical witnesses to the same accident
will present different but complementary accounts of the same event. If the
objection is raised that the same occurrence or pericope is sometimes found at
different times or places in Jesus' ministry, depending upon which Gospel one
consults, the simple answer is that no one Gospel contains or was ever intended
to contain the complete account of Jesus' three-year ministry. Furthermore,
Jesus (like any preacher) certainly spoke the same messages to different groups
at different times. And suppose He did throw the moneychanger out of the Temple
twice: is it not strange, in light of their activity and His principles, the He
only threw them out twice? (We would have expected it every
Saturday-Sabbath-night.) Observe also how honestly and in what an unflattering
manner the apostolic company picture themselves in these records. Mar, Perer's
companion, describes him as having a consistent case of foot-in-the-mouth
disease; and the Apostles in general are presented (in Jesus' own words) as
"slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken." To use New
Testament translator J.B. Phillips's expression, the internal content of the
New Testament records has "the ring of truth."

(d) Finally, what about
external defects in the testimony itself, i.e., inconsistencies between the New
Testament accounts and what we know to be the case from archaeology or
extra-biblical historical records? Far from avoiding contact with secular
history, the New Testament is replete with explicit references to secular
personages, places, and events. Unlike typical sacred literature, myth, and
fairytale ("Once upon a time..."), the Gospel story begins with "There went out
a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed." Typical of
the New Testament accounts are passages such as the following:

Now in the fifteenth year of the reign
of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being
tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip, tetrarch of Itorea and of the
region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene.

Annas and
Caiaphas being the high priests, the word of God came unto John the son of
Zacharias in the wilderness.

And he came into all the country about
Jordan, preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.

Modern archaeological research has
confirmed again and again the reliability of New Testament geography,
chronology, and general history. To take but a single, striking example: After
the rise of liberal biblical criticism, doubt was expressed as to the
historicity of Pontius Pilate, since he is mentioned even by pagan historians
only in connection with Jesus' death. Then, in 1961, came the discovery at
Caesarea of the now famous "Pilate inscription," definitely showing that, as
usual, the New Testament writers were engaged in accurate historiography.

Thus on no one of the four elements of the McCloskey-Schoenberg construct
for attacking perjury can the New Testament witnesses to Jesus be impugned.

Furthermore, one should realize (and non-lawyers seldom do realize) how
difficult it is to succeed in effective lying or misrepresentation when a
cross-examiner is at work. Richard A. Givens, in his standard work,
Advocacy, in the McGraw-Hill Trial Practice Series, diagrams ordinary
truthful communication and then contrasts it with the tremendous complexities
of deceitful communication (figures 6.2b and 6.2c).

Observe that the
witness engaged in deception must, as it were, juggle at least three balls
simultaneously, while continually estimating his chances of discovery: he must
be sure he doesn't say anything that contradicts what his examiner knows (or
what he thinks his examiner knows); he must tell a consistent lie ("liars must
have good memories"); and he must take care that nothing he says can be checked
against contradictory external data. Givens's point is that successful
deception is terribly difficult, for the psychological strain and energy
expended in attempting it makes the deceiver exceedingly vulnerable.

The wider the angles of divergence
between these various images, the more confusing the problem, and the more
"higher mathematics" must be done in order to attempt to avoid direct conflicts
between these elements. The greater the angle of deception employed, the
greater the complexity and the lower the effectiveness of these internal mental
operations. If this is conscious, we attribute this to lying. If it is
unconscious we lay it to the "bias" of the witness.

If one is lying or
strongly biased, it is not enough to simply dredge up whatever mental trace
there may be of the event and attempt to articulate it in answer to a question.
Instead, all of the various elements mentioned must be weighed, a decision made
as to the best approach, a reply contrived that is expected to be most
convincing, and then an effort made to launch this communication into the minds
of the audience.

The person with a wide angle of divergence between
what is recalled and the impression sought to be given is thus at an almost
helpless disadvantage, especially if confronting a cross-examiner who
understands the predicament.

If the audience includes both a
cross-examiner and a tribunal, the number of elements to be considered becomes
even greater. The mental gymnastics required rise in geometric proportion to
the number of elements involved.

Now, wholly apart from the question as to
whether the New Testament witnesses to Jesus were the kind of people to engage
in such deception (and we have already seen, in examining them for possible
internal and external defects, that they were not): had they attempted
such a massive deception, could they have gotten away with it?
Admittedly, they were never put on a literal witness stand, but they
concentrated their preaching on synagogue audiences. This put their testimony
at the mercy of the hostile Jewish religious leadership who had had intimate
contact with Jesus' ministry and had been chiefly instrumental in ending it.

Such an audience eminently satisfies Givens's description of "both a
cross-examiner and a tribunal": they had the means, motive, and
opportunity to expose the apostolic witness as inaccurate and deceptive
if it had been such. The fact that they did not can only be effectively
explained on the ground that they could not. It would seem, for example,
inconceivable that the Jewish religious leadership, with their intimate
knowledge of the Old Testament, would have sat idly by as the Apostles
proclaimed that Jesus' life and ministry had fulfilled dozens of highly
specific Old Testament prophecies (birth at Bethlehem, virgin birth, flight to
Egypt, triumphal entry, sold by a friend for thirty pieces of silver, etc.,
etc.), had that not been true, Professor F. F. Bruce of the University of
Manchester underscores this fundamental point as to the evidential significance
of the hostile witnesses:

It was not only friendly eyewitnesses
that the early preachers had to reckon with; there were others less well
disposed who were also conversant with the main facts of the ministry and death
of Jesus. The disciples could not afford to risk inaccuracies (not to speak of
willful manipulation of the facts), which would at once be exposed by those who
would be only too glad to do so. On the contrary, one of the strong points in
the original apostolic preaching is the confident appeal to the knowledge of
the hearers; they not only said, "We are witnesses of these things," but also,
"As you yourselves also know" (Acts 2:22). Had there been any tendency to
depart from the facts in any material respect, the possible presence of hostile
witnesses in the audience would have served as a further corrective.

We do not waste time on the possibility
that the disciples were suffering from insane delusions. First, because the law
presumes a man sane, and there is no suggestion in the accounts the Apostles
were otherwise. Second, because the point Professor Bruce has just stressed
concerning the hostile witnesses applies with equal force to the insanity
suggestion: had the disciples distorted Jesus' biography for any reason,
including a deluded state of mind, the hostile witnesses would surely have used
this against them.

The functional equivalence of hostile witnesses
with formal cross-examination goes far to answer the occasionally voiced
objection that the apostolic testimony to Jesus would be rejected by a modern
court as "hearsay," i.e., out-of-court statements tendered to prove the truth
of their contents. Let us note at the outset the most severe problem with
hearsay testimony: the originator of it is not in court and so cannot be
subjected to searching cross-examination. Thus even when New Testament
testimony to Jesus would technically fall under the axe of the hearsay rule,
the hostile witnesses as functional cross-examiners reduce the problem to the
vanishing point.

In the second place, the hearsay rule exists in
Anglo-American common law (no such rule is a part of the Continental civil law
tradition) especially as a technical device to protect juries from secondhand
evidence. Following the virtual abolition of the civil jury in England, the
Civil Evidence Act of 1968 in effect eliminated the hearsay rule by statute
from civil trials-on the ground that judges can presumably sift even secondhand
testimony for its truth-value. In the United States, and in English criminal
trials, the exceptions to the hearsay rule have almost swallowed up the rule,
and one of these exceptions is the "ancient documents" rule (to which we
referred earlier), by which the New Testament documents would indeed be
received as competent evidence.

To be sure, the underlying principle
of the hearsay rule remains vital: that a witness ought to testify "of his own
knowledge or observation," not on the basis of what has come to him indirectly
from others. And the New Testament writers continually tell us that they are
setting forth that "which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes,
which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled...the Word of life."
Simon Greenleaf's summation of the testimonial case for Jesus' life, ministry,
and claims about Himself offers a perennial challenge to the earnest seeker for
truth.

All that Christianity asks of men on
this subject, is, that they would be consistent with themselves; that they
would treat its evidences as they treat the evidence of other things; and that
they would try and judge its actors and witnesses, as they deal with their
fellow men, when testifying to human affairs and actions, in human tribunals.
Let the witnesses be compared with themselves, with each other, and with
surrounding facts and circumstances; and let their testimony be sifted, as if
it were given in a court of justice, on the side of the adverse party, the
witness being subjected to a rigorous cross-examination. The result, it is
confidently believed, will be an undoubting conviction of their integrity,
ability, and truth. In the course of such an examination, the undesigned
coincidences will multiply upon us at every step in our progress; the
probability of the veracity of the witnesses and of the reality of the
occurrences which they relate will increase, until it acquires, for all
practical purposes, the value and force of demonstration.

At the heart of the apostolic testimony
and proclamation is the alleged resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
During His ministry, Jesus offered His forthcoming resurrection as the decisive
proof of His claim to deity. Did the Resurrection in fact occur?

First, consider the written records of the Resurrection and of detailed
post-resurrection appearances which occurred over a forty-day period. What is
important here is that these accounts are all contained in the very New
Testament documents whose historical reliability we have already confirmed and
are testified to by the same apostolic witnesses whose veracity we have just
established. To do an abrupt volte-face and now declare those documents
and witnesses to be untrustworthy because they assert that Jesus rose from the
dead would be to substitute a dubious metaphysic ("resurrections from the dead
are cosmically impossible"- and how does one establish that in a
relativistic, Einsteinium universe?) for careful historical investigation. We
must not make the mistake of eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, who
thought he could avoid evidential drudgery by deductively reasoning from the
gratuitous premise that "affirm and unalterable experience has established the
laws of nature" to the (entirely circular) conclusions: "There must be a
uniform experience against every miraculous event" and "That a dead man should
come to life has never been observed in any age or country."

Second,
we should reflect upon the force of the "missing body" argument of Frank
Morison, who was converted to Christianity through his investigation of the
evidence for the Resurrection. His argument proceeds as follows: (1) If Jesus
didn't rise, someone must have stolen the body; (2) the only people involved
were the Roman authorities, the Jewish religious leaders, and Jesus' disciples;
(3) the Romans and the Jewish religious leaders would certainly not have taken
the body, since to do so would have been against their own interests (the
Romans wanted to keep Palestine quiet, and the Jews wanted to preserve their
religious influence),; and (4) the disciples would hardly have stolen the body
and then died for what they knew to be untrue; (5) Ergo-by process of
elimination-Jesus rose from the dead just as the firsthand accounts
declare.

I have shown elsewhere that Antony Flew's attempt to avoid
the impact of this argument is unsuccessful. When Flew says that Christians
simply prefer a biological miracle (the Resurrection) to a psychological
miracle (the disciples dying for what they knew to be false), he completely
misses the point. The issue is not metaphysical preference; it is testimonial
evidence. No such evidence exists to support a picture of psychologically
aberrant disciples, while tremendously powerful testimonial evidence exists to
the effect that Jesus physically rose from the dead.

During the last
few years, more inventive attempts to explain away the Resurrection have
appeared. Schonfield's Passover Plot argues that Jesus induced His own
crucifixion, drugging Himself so as to survive just long enough in the tomb to
convince the fuddled disciples that He had risen. (Quaere: How does this
square with Jesus' own moral teachings? And does it not leave us with precisely
the same problem as to what finally happened to the body?) Von Daniken-who
turned to pseudo-scientific writing while serving a prison sentence in
Switzerland for embezzlement, fraud, and forgery-"explains" the Resurrection by
suggesting that it was the product of a close encounter of the third kind:
Jesus was a kind of Martian cleverly dressed in a Jesus suit who knew a few
tricks such as how to appear to rise from the dead.

Aren't such
hypotheses possible? Doubtless, in our contingent universe, anything is
possible (as one philosopher said) except squeezing toothpaste back into the
tube. But legal reasoning operates on probabilities, not possibilities:
preponderance of evidence in most civil actions; evidence beyond reasonable
(not beyond all) doubt in criminal matters. The Federal Rules of
Evidence defines relevant evidence as "evidence having any tendency to make
the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the
action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence."
Suppose a jury brought in a verdict of "innocent" because it is always
possible that invisible Martians, not the accused, were responsible for
the crime! Judges in the United States carefully instruct juries to pay
attention only to the evidence in the case, and to render verdicts in
accord with it. A guilty verdict in a criminal matter should be rendered only
if the jury cannot find any reasonable explanation of the crime (i.e., any
explanation in accord with the evidence) other than that the accused did
it. May we suggest that the tone and value of discussions about Jesus'
resurrection would be considerably elevated if equally rigorous thinking were
applied thereto?

Can we base ultimates (Jesus' deity, our commitment
to Him for time and eternity) on mere probabilities? The analytical
philosophers have shown that we have no other choice: only formal ("analytic")
truths (e.g., the propositions of deductive logic and of pure mathematics) can
be demonstrated absolutely-and the absoluteness here is due to the definitional
nature of their axiomatic foundations, as with Euclid's geometry. All matters
of fact ("synthetic" assertions) are limited to probabilistic confirmation, but
this does not immobilize us in daily life. We still put our very lives in
jeopardy every day on the basis of probability judgements (crossing the street,
consuming packaged foods and drugs, flying in airplanes, etc.). And the law in
every land redistributes property and takes away liberty (if not life) by
verdicts and judgments rooted in the examination of evidence and probabilistic
standards of proof.

But the issue here is a miracle: a
resurrection. How much evidence ought a reasonable man require in order to
establish such a fact? Could evidence ever justify accepting it? Thomas
Sherlock, Master of the Temple Church (owned by two of the four guilds of
English barristers, the Honorable Societies of the Inner and Middle Temple) and
Bishop of London, well answered these questions in the eighteenth
century:

Suppose you saw a Man publickly
executed, his Body afterwards wounded by the Executioner, and carry'd and laid
in the Grave; that after this you shou'd be told, that the Man was come to Life
again: What wou'd you suspect in this Case? Not that the Man had never been
dead; for that you saw your self: But you wou'd suspect whether he was now
alive. But wou'd you say, this Case excluded all human Testimony; and that Men
could not possibly discern, whether one with whom they convers'd familiarly,
was alive or no? Upon what Ground cou'd you say this? A Man rising from the
Grave is an Object of Sense, and can give the same Evidence of his being alive,
as any other Man in the World can give. So that a Resurrection consider'd only
as a Fact to be proved by Evidence, is a plain Case; it requires no greater
Ability in the Witnesses, than that they be able to distinguish between a Man
dead, and a Man alive: A Point, in which I believe every Man living thinks
himself a Judge.

Bishop Sherlock is
certainly correct that a resurrection does not in principle create any
insuperable evidential difficulty. Phenomenally (and this is all we need worry
about for evidential purposes) a resurrection can be regarded as death
followed by life,

D, then L.

Normally, the
sequence is reversed, thus:

L, then D.

We are well acquainted with the phenomenal
meaning of the constituent factors (though we do not understand the "secret" of
life or why death must occur). Furthermore, we have no difficulty in
establishing evidential criteria to place a person in one category rather than
in the other. Thus the eating of fish is sufficient to classify the eater among
the living, and a crucifixion is enough to place the crucified among the dead.
In Jesus' case, the sequential order is reversed, but that has no
epistemological bearing on the weight of evidence required to establish death
or life. And if Jesus was dead at point A, and alive again at point B, then
resurrection has occurred: res ipsa loquitur.

However, does not
the unreliability of eyewitness testimony cast doubt on an event as
extraordinary as the Resurrection? Psychologists such as Loftus have pointed up
genuine dangers in eyewitness testimony. Nonetheless, as we have already seen,
it remains the cornerstone of legal evidence. As for the reliability of
identifying acquaintances (the precise issue in the disciples'
post-resurrection identifications of Jesus), specialists on the subject agree
that "the better acquainted a witness is with a subject, the more likely it is
that the witness' identification will be accurate." These same authorities add
that "in an eyewitness context, the greatest challenge to the advocate's power
of persuasion is presented by the attempt to argue, without support from expert
testimony, the unreliability of an unimpeached eyewitness's identification of a
prior acquaintance." And this is precisely what we have in the case under
consideration: disciples like Thomas provide "unimpeached eyewitness
identification" of the resurrected Jesus with whom they had had the most
intimate acquaintance for the immediately preceding three-year period. No
advocate's "power of persuasion" is going to make a difference to that kind of
identification evidence.

Finally, the objection may be offered: even
granting Jesus' resurrection, is that fact alone enough to establish His deity
and the truth of His claims? Theological presuppositionalists Carl F. H. Henry
and Ronald H. Nash tell us that there are no self-interpreting facts, and
Calvinists R. C. Sproul and John Gerstner, as well as evangelical neo-Thomist
Norman L. Geisler, insist that an independent theistic structure must be
established to make any theological sense out of Jesus' resurrection. We
profoundly disagree. Even Rat-famous for his leading role in Kenneth Grahame's
The Wind in the Willows, but hardly an accomplished
epistemologist-becomes exasperated with his companion for not recognizing that
facts can be self-interpreting:

"Really,
Rat," said the Mole quite pettishly, "I think we've had enough of this folly.
Who ever heard of a doormat telling anyone anything? They simply don't
do it. They are not that sort at all. Doormats know their place."

"Now
look here, you-you thick-headed beast," replied the Rat, really angry, "this
must stop. Not another word, but scrape-scrape and scratch and dig and hunt
round, especially on the sides of the hummocks, if you want to sleep dry and
warm tonight, for it's our last chance!"

Elsewhere we have argued in detail that
facts-historical and otherwise-"in themselves provide adequate criteria for
choosing among variant interpretations of them." Philosopher Paul D. Feinbert
has defended that case with inexorable logic:

Let us consider an example from recent
history. It can be substantiated that some 6 million Jews died under German
rule in the second World War. Let me suggest two mutually exclusive
interpretations. First, these events may be interpreted as the actions of a mad
man who was insanely anti-Sematic. The deaths were murders, atrocities. Second,
it might be asserted that Hitler really loved the Jews. He had a deep and
abiding belief in heaven and life after death. After reviewing Jewish history,
Hitler decided that the Jews had been persecuted enough, and because of his
love for them he was seeking to help them enter eternal blessedness. If no
necessity exists between events and interpretation, then there is no way of
determining which meaning is correct. We would never be justified in claiming
that one holding the latter view is wrong. This is both repugnant and absurd.
There must be an empirical necessity that unites an event or fact with its
correct interpretation.

Beyond this, we merely remind the reader
that the very nature of legal argument (judgments rendered on the basis of
factual verdicts) rests on the ability of facts to speak for themselves. As a
single illustration, taking the leading U.S. Supreme Court case of Williams
v. North Carolina (the "second Williams case"), which stands for the
proposition that a divorce on substituted or constructive service in one state
need only be given full faith and credit by another state when the parties have
acquired a bona fide domicile in the divorcing state. In the course of its
opinion, the Court declared:

Petitioners, long time residents of
North Carolina, came to Nevada, where they stayed in an auto-court for
transients, filed suits for divorce as soon as the Nevada law permitted,
married one another as soon as the divorces were obtained, and promptly
returned to North Carolina to live. It cannot reasonably be claimed that one
set of inferences rather than another regarding the acquisition by petitioners
of new domiciles [sic] in Nevada could be drawn from the circumstances
attending their Nevada divorces.

Geisler misrepresents
us when he says that we hold that "the resurrection is so bizarre, so odd, that
only a supernatural explanation will adequately account for it." In our view
there are two compelling reasons to accept Jesus' resurrection as implicating
His deity. First, "this miracle deals effectively with the most fundamental
area of man's universal need, the conquest of death"-a truth recognized in law
by the "dying declaration" exception to the hearsay rule (even the declaration
of the homicide victim without religious faith is admissible in evidence, on
the ground that one is particularly likely to tell the truth when conscious of
the immanence of that most terrible of existential events). If death is indeed
that significant, then "not to worship One who gives you the gift of eternal
life is hopelessly to misread what the gift tells you about the Giver."

In the second place, there are logically only two possible kinds of
explanation or interpretation of the fact of the Resurrection: that given by
the person raised, and that given by someone else. Surely, if only Jesus was
raised, He is in a far better position (indeed, in the only position!)
to interpret or explain it. Until Von Daniken, for example, rises from the
dead, we will prefer Jesus' account of what happened. And Jesus tells us that
His miraculous ministry is explicable because He is no less than God in human
form: "I and my Father are one"; "He who has seen me has seen the Father."
Theism then becomes the proper inference from Jesus' resurrection as He Himself
explained it-not a prior metaphysical hurdle to jump in order to arrive at the
proper historical and evidential interpretation of that event.

Jesus'
deity in itself establishes the truth of the Christian message, over against
competing religions and secular world-views. And Jesus' teachings per se, being
God's teachings, represent an infallible guide to human life and conduct. But
Jesus does more even than this. By His direct statements concerning the Old
Testament as divine revelation and by His consistent quoting of it as
trustworthy and divinely authoritative in all respects, Jesus put upon it His
(i.e., God's) imprimatur. By giving His Apostles a special gift of the
Holy Spirit to recall infallibly what He had taught them, and, by implication,
to recognize apostolicity in others, He proleptically stamped with approval as
divine revelation the future writings of Apostles (the original twelve, minus
Judas Iscariot, plus Paul-grafted in as Apostle to the Gentiles) and writings
by their associates (Mark, Luke, etc.) whose accuracy the Apostles were in a
position to verify. As a result, the entire Bible-Old Testament and New-becomes
an unerring source of absolute principles.

Two objections may be
raised to the argument we have just presented. First, why should the mere fact
that God says something guarantee its truth? Second, what if the incarnate
Christ was so limited to the human ideas of His time that His stamp of approval
on the Bible represents no guarantee of its absolute accuracy?

The
first of these arguments is reflected in Descartes's discussion of God as a
possible "Evil Genius"-a cosmic liar. But if He were, He would be a divine and,
therefore, consummate liar, so you would be incapable of catching Him at it. In
short, He would be a better liar than you are a detective. So the very idea of
God-as-liar is meaningless-an analytically unverifiable notion in principle.
Once you have met God incarnate, you have no choice but to trust Him: as to the
way of salvation and as to the reliability of the entire Bible.

The
suggestion that Jesus was limited to human and fallible ideas (the so-called
Kenotic theory of liberal theology) also collapses under its own weight. On
Kenotic reasoning, either Jesus chose to conform His statements to the fallible
ideas of His time (in which case He was an opportunist who, in the spirit of
Lenin, committed one of the most basic of all moral errors, that of allowing
the end to justify the means); or He couldn't avoid self-limitation in the very
process of Incarnation (in which case Incarnation is of little or no value to
us, since there is then no guarantee that it reveals anything conclusive). And
note that if such a dubious Incarnation mixed absolute wheat with culturally
relative chaff, we would have no sufficient criterion for separating them
anyway, so the "absolute" portion would do us no good!

To meet man's
desperate need for apodictic principles of human conduct, an incarnate God must
not speak with a forked tongue. And, as we have seen, no divine stuttering has
occurred. To the contrary: His message can be relied upon as evidentially
established, a sure light shining in a dark world, illuminating the path to
eternity.

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